Harbl the cat... only a very different man... TLDR

[NickYYC]

Agreed.

Harb…..I hate to tell you this, but there some pretty big brains already working on the autism issue and have been for a few decades now. A family acquaintance of ours is one of the leading autism researchers in the world and he's now working right here in Edmonton. He has more IQ points in his little finger than most of us could ever dream of having in our whole being. He doesn't work directly with kids in a therapy sense. He's in the research end of things. Brilliant man.

I'm not saying you couldn't make great contributions to helping (not necessarily curing) people with autism using your talents. As I'm sure you've already learned, autism is a genetic thing. Unless you plan on becoming a genetic engineer, you're not going to "cure" it. I'm going to be really blunt here, so I hope you're not offended. I think you're trying to hide from dealing with your daughter directly and your personal escape is telling yourself that you're going to work on a cure rather than working WITH her. I've seen other parents of autistic kids doing similar things....hiding in their work. Trust me on this. If you focus your energy on working WITH her, you'll yield far better results than trying to find an actual cure. She is going to need a lot of direct work and patience on your part. You are going to have to take her places, work on her speech, work with her on general life skills. Teaching her things like getting dressed and person hygiene are going to take a lot more effort than your average kid. The mistake I think you're about to make is you're going to try and bury yourself in work and leave it all the other stuff up to your wife. I can't put into mere words how much I think that will be a huge mistake that you'll live to regret.

Genetic engineering is not that dissimilar from software engineering. If anything, given the size and scope of the human genome, I'd say genetic engineering is quite amateurish in comparison to some of the systems I've worked on. That said, where I'm coming from was from burying myself in my work to become the best at what I was doing to contemplating completely abandoning my career to heal my child. Fortunately for me, there's massive overlap in the competencies in a genetic engineer and a software engineer.

What you're describing is more or less what I'm contemplating doing.

I'm leaning very heavily towards selling all my possessions and expending most of my wealth specifically so that I can focus on healing and teaching my daughters.

You see, the thing is there is no general "cure" for autism (that being, by Western medicine's standards, there's nothing that can be prescribed for it), but there is a unique way to cure each autistic child.

The key is to form a physical, mental, and spiritual bond with and enable genetic expression and neurogenesis of the brain to develop capabilities within the child to overcome the inherent "defects" in genetic expression that manifest as what we know as autism.

The thing is, it's bullshit that everything is genetic. Some things are, most things are not.

The vast majority of illness is manifest through unresolved trauma in one of the 3 elements of each human being: the mind, body, and spirit.

Cancer, diabetes, Alzheimers, heart disease and stroke - and yes, autism.

The problem with Western medicine is it's reliance on scientific empiricism through study of the physical properties of the body. However the mind and spirit don't operate under the rules of the physical world.

All science at it's core is the sampling of states of of matter and energy within linear units of time. The thing is, the mind, and with it, human consciousness demonstrably does not function within the boundaries of the time scale we rely on for scientific experimentation. Try some psychedelics like cannabis and develop a meditation practice and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

This is why so many illnesses, including the one's that are in the top 10 list of causes of death within the West (most specifically, Canada and the US) "have no cure."

Western medicine is great at healing mass physical trauma, but completely neglects mental and spiritual trauma. I am certain integrating treatment modalities for all 3 is key to remedying the worst symptoms of autism... challenge is, it all comes at a cost... mine may well be everything I've worked for the past 20 years.